SEO 301 Redirects and CTA’s

Chuck: Maybe an old page that you — you may redesign your site, right? And you put up a new site and you got these old pages that you haven’t deleted and they’re indexed and they’re in Google cache and so those sites may rank well unfortunately.

Chris: Yep.

Chuck: So you don’t —

Chris: So what do you do with those sites?

Chuck: You redirect them.

Chris: 301, yeah. 301 redirect. We talked about it all the time. You don’t want to just send traffic that direction. You want a 301 redirect. By the way, if it’s ranking better than your new website, you need to some analysis and understand — I mean your new webpage, the replacement webpage. You need to do some analysis and understand what do I have on the old version of the page that’s outperforming the new version? And make sure you get that transferred over.

Chuck: And then redirect it.

Chris: Another thing that is really important for checking for issues is really related to what we call SEVO, search engine visitor optimization. For instance, we don’t have control of what page Google will show/display for a given search term, right? So we have some control and we work to control that as much as we can. Google tends to favor the homepage even though some other pages may have a significant and more content relevant to it.

One of the examples is one of our clients is a human behavior expert. As a human behavior expert he’s created some quit smoking products. And so some traffic will come to that website. It’s PatrickWanis.com, and they’ll come having searched quit smoking in a particular city and Google is choosing to send them to the homepage, not to his quit smoking product page. And so when you look at that, that is where you — we’re digging into analytics every five minutes and you look at them you’re like, “Okay, great. I’m getting traffic from quit smoking. Where are they landing?

So you actually have to go do the search. There the landing, you can find it in Google Analytics. It’s actually easier. Just go pull up Google, search quit smoking, and click it. And it turns out they’re laying on the homepage which doesn’t have any clear and obvious quit smoking link.

Chuck: Yeah. It’s a small CTA I think.

Chris: Yep. So we added a bigger one with smoke actually waving so it really stood out and sales increased significantly. So that would be an issue for an entrance page. And that goes back to what we talk about regularly which is continuity.

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: If I search for quit smoking, when I land — first off, in the search engine results page I want to see quit smoking.

Chuck: In the ad or in the —

Chris: In the description.

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. Both the PPC or the organic listing and then when I click it I need to see quit smoking pretty quickly because otherwise I’m just going to bounce. Why think? Why search? Just go back and choose another one.

Chuck: I think that contact information. We’re talking about stuff that’s getting left off for their landing page when we would land there, the entrance page. Make sure you have the right contact information. This could be a search that may be time sensitive type of industry you’re in. And so when I do click, when I do land there, the next thing is to pick up the phone and call. And if this is some page that you just did, you’re testing it, and you failed to list the proper contact information, then you wasted a click and you get a bounce. And so make sure your entrance page is definitely optimized and has the right information on it.

Chris: Yep. And there’s something that we probably don’t mention enough and that’s the ability to what’s called call tracking.

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: It’s certainly a service we offer here for our clients where what we’ll end up doing on your website we’ll replace your current business phone number and we can do this multiple locations. There’s a number of —

Chuck: Multiple numbers.

Chris: Yeah. There’s a whole lot of tools we can use with this. But when we replace that number with another number that other number forwards to your business number and what that allows us to do is we can track — we can get to the level of detail of tracking keywords and specific keywords coming — how did somebody — if somebody called you, what keywords did they use to call you? That’s pretty granular. It’s some pretty good data.

Chuck: Yeah. It depends on how massive your campaign is.

Chris: Yeah.

Chuck: You have thousands of keywords and maybe 10 or 20 different sorts of products, then it may be necessary to get 5 or 10 different phone numbers for each type of product you have and that way you can determine who is calling. Call tracking is so cool. We can not only tracking who’s calling but what time they called, where they called from, record the call.

Chris: Yeah. By the way, the recording the call is absolutely significant. There’s one example that we had where —

Chuck: About the salespeople thing?

Chris: Yeah, in a program. We go to the owner and the owner — we’re excited. This is getting — we know what stats from their finance department that they’re actually closing 25% of the calls that are coming in and we go to the owner and we’re like, “Look at this. There’s this many calls and 25% of those are closing and we’re excited to be showing it to him. He’s like, “What? 25% are closing? That’s ridiculous. We closed 50%.”

I think in this case it was actually 75% which is just impressive. “We usually close 75%.” And we’re like, “Well,” now we’re like, “Uh-oh.” We’ve pulled back and we’re like, “Well, let’s listen to some of those calls.” And as we listened to the calls with the owner, it turns out that the salespeople taking the calls were going off of script. So they have a meeting. “Look, salespeople, stay on the script.” Their sales go back to 75%. I don’t even know how you define the value of what we gave to that business because it’s massive.

Chuck: 50%.

Chris: 50% in perpetuity.

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: I mean if you think about it, if the salespeople have fallen off — probably it was a situation where you ended up hiring extra salespeople and they weren’t trained well enough. So he got them trained properly. But that’s the value — that’s one of the values that call tracking brings. It’s just really good to know that you’re spending money on internet marketing and calls are coming in because of x, y, z.

Chuck: Yeah, if your business requires a phone call. A lot of businesses don’t necessarily require a phone call or email contact form or it may be a download. But like I said, an e-commerce site then it may not be entirely necessary to invest in call tracking. But if you need to be on the phone with them, it’s definitely a worthwhile investment.

Chris: So another issue, we mentioned old page that’s live. That could be a problem on entrance page. Files with no navigation. Now, this is a little weird. It kind of goes back to the orphan page, when the older page that maybe even the links on it aren’t connected.

Chuck: They’re broken. Most people redesign a site because they need to improve layout and improve navigation. They have new products, new features. And if that old page gets found with some old navigation on it, then the people get lost and they can’t find what they’re searching for.

Chris: And then ask yourself as you’re looking at your analytics data, again, is this the best landing page for this keyword.

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: And if it’s not, it doesn’t mean you need to redesign it. I was in a meeting with a client yesterday. They do a number of things. They do siding and they do windows, yeah, HardiePlank kind of siding and window installations — sales and installations. And the homepage for them needs to be quick and concise so that if somebody — if one of their sales guys handed out a card and the sales guy — one sales guy may be selling window products, another may be selling siding, both of those users are going to end up going to the homepage, they need to be able to find windows and siding very quickly.

Chuck: Very quickly, yeah.

Chris: But you don’t want to send somebody who’s searched for windows or siding to that page because that gives them an extra click before they get to the target page. You actually want to send them directly to the right landing page, the windows landing page or the siding landing page from that particular website. I think that’s all we got for — I think it was great information actually.

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: Again, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, because you listen to us a lot. We really appreciate that. You can find us at — actually, you can listen to the podcast live on Friday mornings, E-Webstyle.com.

Chuck: Friday afternoon.

Chris: Or Friday afternoon or Friday evening. Eventually, we’ll be here. I won’t have coffee. I’ll have a beer while we’re doing our podcast.

Chuck: That might not be a bad idea.

Chris: Yeah. Maybe we should just have the beer in the morning. It’s afternoon somewhere in the world. And we’re an international crowd. E-Webstyle.com/seopodcast is a good page where you can find information about our SEO podcast and actually see the video of our podcast on Friday mornings. We do tweet right before so make sure you follow us on Twitter and then you’ll know when we’re about to broadcast our podcast.

Chuck: It’s @Ewebstyle.

Chris: Which, by the way, I typed up the tweet but I did not send it. So normally, we tweet.

Chuck: Well, I tweeted.

Chris: Okay. So it got tweeted. You can also, of course, follow us on Twitter. It’s Twitter.com/ewebstyle. Send us an email. We do do websites. Our focus is entire internet marketing, really making great websites, driving traffic to those websites, and then iterating back and forth with the traffic and the website to optimize the value that you can get from your website and that traffic.

Chuck: Making sure they convert. No need in having a great website that doesn’t generate leads.

Chris: Like I said and I mentioned this in the meeting, I have never met an owner who said, “I don’t care how few phone calls I get. I just want my website to look good.”

Chuck: Yeah.

Chris: I never met that owner. Usually, it’s “I don’t care how ugly it is —

Chuck: As long as it works.

Chris: — just make the phone ring.” Exactly. So thank you guys for listening. Again, stay in contact with us. Follow us. Until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burres.

Author: eweb-admin

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